As a staff attorney, you'll spend 80% of your time helping homeless folks resolve legal issues that affect their ability to be stability housed. You'll conduct a comprehensive legal screening ("check-up") and handle the traffic, civil, and misdemeanors; landlord-tenant issues; child support and divorce; and debt relief issues that you identify. The remaining 20% of the time you will work on a poverty-related legal reform project.
responsibilities
- Give your clients white glove, holistic legal services
- Be responsive to their case managers at partner organizations
- Craft and self-direct your legal reform project
- Pitch in whenever and wherever you needed
qualifications
- Have a JD, be able to practice law in Michigan
- Have 1+ years of legal aid or pro bono experience (clinic counts)
- Be able to teach yourself (and then us, clients) new areas of law
- Be able to work multiple types of cases, a jack of all trades
salary
Pay and benefits are in line with legal services salaries and commensurate with experience. We know we're not able to pay you what you'd get in the for-profit world, but we promise that you'll always be treated with respect, have flexibility to shape work around your home life and other obligations, and, most importantly, have the freedom to do justice. Starting salary is $55k with mechanical escalators for experience and time with us per our equitable pay policy.
about street democracy
We're a small group of justice architects. We use our legal skills to transform the systems that perpetuate poverty into systems of opportunity. We're generalists with enough range to help our homeless clients navigate those problematic systems. And we're creative tinkerers when developing better ways to achieve justice--even if the prototype is all jenky and held together by duct tape. :p But we're not too self-important that we can't laugh about the hubris of chasing after our dreams.
deia
We strongly encourage people of color, women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, people with past involvement in the justice system, and people with experience with poverty to apply. This is more than a generic policy statement, as 83% of our board and staff have multiple identities and all of us have at least one.
how to apply
Apply at https://jobs.streetdemocracy.org